Category: New York Islanders

Friday roundup: A’s owner wants public to fund “some” of $1B Vegas stadium, Coyotes swear they’re not moving to Houston, and more

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy December! I was up real late last night, so let’s get straight to the remaining news of the week:

  • Nevada Gov.  says he’s “not inclined” to call a special session of the state legislature to figure out how to fund an Oakland A’s stadium in Las Vegas, says A’s owner John Fisher is looking for a $1 billion retractable-roofed ballpark, and indicated, “They wanted some public money. In what form, they didn’t really specify.” He also said that he wouldn’t further raise hotel taxes, the revenue source that paid for the Las Vegas Raiders stadium, and “I explained to them that I didn’t want to be a stalking horse. They said they weren’t doing that, and they were serious about this.” That’s what everyone says, even those proposing stalking horses! At least we know now that Fisher wants “some” public money toward a $1 billion Vegas stadium, if he’s serious about building one; admittedly it’s not much, but in 2021 we have to be happy with any morsel of facts we can come by.
  • The Arizona Coyotes front office has issued a statement that no matter what Forbes’ Mike Ozanian says, they’re not selling the team to someone who’ll move it to Houston. Either this is going to be hilariously awkward to walk back if the rumor turns out to be true, or Ozanian doesn’t know what he’s talking about again.
  • David Gilbert, president and CEO of Destination Cleveland, on the Guardians‘ freshly approved $285-million-or-more stadium renovation subsidy: “Economically, people can talk about whether or not it’s right for public funding to be part of professional sports facilities, but in our country, it is a reality.” I have misplaced my tourism-official-to-English dictionary, but I’m pretty sure that translates as “Yeah yeah, right and wrong, this is just standard business procedure, that’s all America has ever cared about.”
  • Now that the St. Louis Rams lawsuit is all over but for the shouting about how the NFL and Rams owner Stan Kroenke will split the $790 million settlement cost, it’s also time for the city and county of St. Louis and the local stadium authority to fight about how they will split the proceeds.
  • Buffalo’s Investigative Post is suing the state of New York to force the release of two studies commissioned by the Bills owners that looked into the relative feasibility of building a new stadium or renovating the existing one, and evaluated the economic impact of the Bills’ presence in the state. Please note that this is not the study of stadium renovation costs that Erie County is refusing to release without blacking out almost all of it; rather, these are two other studies that Gov. Kathy Hochul is refusing to release at all, though her administration admits it has copies. The odds on the suit forcing the documents’ release before Hochul puts a new stadium in the 2022 state budget seem slim, but at least maybe it will let us point and laugh after the fact.
  • The New York Islanders‘ new arena is causing a traffic nightmare for its neighbors in Elmont, with fans “parking anywhere they want, urinating and cursing,” according to WCBS-TV. Things may improve once a new arena parking garage is complete, but it’s probably best not to hope that a lot more fans will start taking the train instead.
  • “Last year, a report out of central Florida showed that only 23.9 percent of NFL senior executives are anything but white men. All of that whiteness has manifested itself, disproportionately, in the stands and in luxury boxes, where white NFL owners get brandished on every telecast as their team’s No. 1 fan. Those owners have endeavored to remake the front-facing part of their customer base in their image, and they are succeeding. Money is their foremost tool to accomplish this task.” That all is some pretty solid structural political analysis, especially from a column titled Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo.
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Trains to new Islanders arena are empty of fans, full of sadness

access_time personNeil deMause

I almost headed out to the new New York Islanders arena for the team’s first two home games last weekend to see how the Rube Goldbergesque temporary train travel situation was, while everyone waits for the full completion of a new $105 million station for the arena, about 40% of which will be paid for by state taxpayers. But, you know, that would have required leaving the house, so instead I did the 21st-century journalist thing of just looking at Twitter — and at least there, people are not happy.

Much of the reporting comes from the Long Island commuting site The LIRR Today, which started by doing headcounts of how many people were riding trains in the vicinity (QVG is Queens Village, the stop where riders from Long Island need to get off and take a shuttle bus while waiting for the new Elmont station to be open in both directions):

Yep, that’s not much. In a longer web post, The LIRR Today reports that “on both nights, ridership was only about 5% of the 17,255 fans in attendance,” so clearly pretty much everyone was driving to the games, either because they didn’t want to deal with shuttle buses or just because they would rather drive. The state’s environmental impact study “projected potential adverse traffic impacts” if anything less than 12% of fans took the train, and a further study projected that once the Elmont station was open, “24% of attendees would take the LIRR for a Saturday game and 30% for a weekday game.” So clearly there’s a ways to go there.

As for those who took the train, things did not always go well for them:

https://twitter.com/tnminutmen/status/1462628484803706883?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1462628484803706883%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thelirrtoday.com%2F2021%2F11%2Fopening-weekend-at-ubs-arena-weak-on.html

I could get into details about exactly how the train transfers are supposed to work here, but suffice to say: You can’t get anywhere without switching trains, and the trains aren’t timed to allow for quick transfers, which led to a lot of standing around on platforms waiting for the next train. This is a very LIRR thing to have happen, but it also has people wondering why the state is spending all this money on a new train station right next to two other stations (the Queens Village stop and the existing Belmont Park rail spur, which like the temporary Elmont station only works in one direction) instead of just running a ton of free shuttle buses:

But, of course, the rationale for the new train station wasn’t that it made any sense, but rather that the Islanders owners reeeeeally wanted it, because half the point of a new arena was so that it would have better transit access than the old Nassau Coliseum, which required taking a train to a bus. To their credit, they’re splitting the cost with the state; less to their credit, even $41 million in state funding is $41 million that the LIRR could be using on something else, whether figuring out how to get people between the train stations and the arena or something entirely non-hockey-related.

All this could change once the Elmont station is fully open, of course, though there’s also another problem with the idea that commuters will just hop off the train on their way home, check out an Islanders game, then resume their journey afterwards:

UBS Arena is one of an increasing number of venues with an unfriendly “no bag policy”.  Only impractically small clutch bags can be taken inside the arena.

This will make things difficult for those looking to take the train from work to an event on weeknights—if you can’t take your bag into the arena, you either need to leave everything behind at your office, leave your belongings behind at the bag check outside the venue (which I would never do if I was carrying my laptop or had any work papers with me), or stop off someplace else to leave your bag. This almost requires going home or getting back to your car first so you can leave your belongings behind before getting to the arena.

This was all thought through really well! Maybe in a distant future where the Elmont station is operating in both directions and no one carries laptops or work papers because all that resides in their brain chips, that $41 million in state money will end up being well spent. For now, though, it looks more like burning a pile of money so that a handful of people can have terrible train rides to the game, which, again, is very on-brand for the LIRR, but maybe something the state didn’t entirely need to do just so the Islanders could advertise their games as “now accessible by train (sorta)!”

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Friday roundup: NM United owner still wants biggest USL subsidy ever, Bears owners levy gambling gripes, Coyotes arena could make planes crash

access_time personNeil deMause

And now for the news that slipped through the cracks of the week:

I’m going to be traveling next week, so prepare for a possible light posting schedule. Though if past history is any guide, whenever I go on vacation, all kinds of news immediately happens, and I’ll have my laptop with me, so maybe it’ll just be a normal week from your perspective. We’ll all find out together!

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Islanders to go on Yard Goats-esque road trip while waiting for new arena to be done

access_time personNeil deMause

When last we checked in on the new New York Islanders arena at Belmont Park, team president Lou Lamoriello was swearing that it would be “ready for the coming season” despite apparently slow progress on construction. Three months later — and three months closer to the coming season — we learn this:

“I do expect us to be on the road at the beginning of the year,” said Islanders President and General Manager Lou Lamoriello. “That is our intention. I don’t want to say what the potential date is because it’s a moving target.”

This is a hell of a way to announce that your $1.3 billion arena complex will be weeks or possibly months late in opening, forcing your team to emulate the tragic tale of the Hartford Yard Goats. But to be fair, construction was delayed for a bit by the pandemic, so there’s no scandal here or anything. It is mildly puzzling why the Islanders won’t just play at the Nassau Coliseum while they wait, but presumably they figure it would be more lucrative to jam all their home games into the end of the season at their new place where they get to keep all the revenues rather than rent out the building down the road that they don’t own, and if the NHL is okay with that, then really it’s no skin off anyone’s nose except maybe Nick Mastroianni’s.

So I apologize for any lack of schadenfreude in this post. To make up for it, here are some screenshots from WCBS-TV’s exclusive look around the construction site:






Feel the excitement! It’ll probably look better once the “YES YES YES CHAMPIONS! GO!” signage is up, or at least through wine goggles.

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Friday roundup: A’s stadium goes lopsided, another Cali soccer stadium stalls, plus how to skip rent payments and use them to fix up your own home

access_time personNeil deMause

I’m very busy this morning, busy enough that one entire news item will have to wait till Monday when I can give it its due, but that means an extra post on Monday, so what are you complaining about, really? Anyway, there’s still plenty of stadium and arena news from this week, let’s have at it:

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Friday roundup: Raiders stadium runs short of tax dollars, Falcons owner makes film about how great Megatron’s Butthole is, and a Ricketts cries poor (again)

access_time personNeil deMause

Well, that was certainly something to wake up to on a post-Thanksgiving Friday morning. Not sure how many U.S. readers are checking the internet today, but if that’s you and you’re looking for some non-Canadian stadium and arena news for your troubles, we have that too:

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Friday roundup: MLB billionaire owners cry poor, Rangers stadium reviews get worse and worse

access_time personNeil deMause

What a week! I know I say that every week, but: What. A. Week. In addition to the World Series insanity, I spent some time this week writing an article about other ways that giant monopolistic cartels screw over regular folks, but it’s not up yet* so you’ll just have to find out about it next week (or keep refreshing my personal website, or follow me on Twitter or something).

In the meantime, there’s lots of sports stadium and arena news to keep you occupied:

  • NYC F.C. may have announced progress on its new soccer stadium this week while providing no indication of actual progress, but the Washington Football Team one-upped them when team president Jason Wright earned an entire NBC Sports article about their stadium plans by saying he didn’t even have a timeline for the process. Meanwhile, the Sacramento Republic likewise issued a statement on their new stadium construction plans that amounted to nothing (“I do have a hard hat in my trunk!” said team president Ben Gumpert, by way of news). At this rate, team owners will be able to get reporting on their stadium campaigns after denying they even want one — oh wait, we’ve gone there already.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred says the league now has $8.3 billion in debt, $3 billion of it accrued during 2020’s pandemic season, which doesn’t actually tell you how well baseball is doing — presumably some of it was borrowed against future revenues from TV contracts and naming-rights deals and the like — but sounds impressive when you’re about to go into union contract talks. Also, notes Marc Normandin, that’s really only a $100 million loss per team, which isn’t an unfathomably huge sum for the billionaires who own most teams; plus we have to take Manfred’s word on that debt figure, and it already doesn’t include things like teams’ ownership of regional sports networks. MLB owners, he writes, are “hoping, as they so often do, that you have no idea how anything works, and will just take them at their word. So that they can do things like, oh, I don’t know, decline the 2021 option on basically everyone with one in order to flood the free agent market with additional players they can then underbid on and underpay, claiming that this is all financially necessary because of all the debt, you see.” Or as we may start calling it soon, getting Brad Handed.
  • Philadelphia public schools lost $112 million in property tax revenues in 2019 that were siphoned off to tax breaks for developers, according to a new Good Jobs First study, nearly double their losses from just two years earlier. Good thing the 76ers‘ plan for an arena funded by siphoned-off property taxes was rejected, though there are more plans where that came from, so Philly schools should probably still hold onto their wallets.
  • One more review of the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium that team owners Ray Davis and Bob Simpson got $500 million to help build because the old one lacked air-conditioning, this one from a fan who’s visited every stadium and arena in North America: “This would probably end up probably down near the bottom.” He added that the upper decks are too far from the field, the place is too dark, the scale is “ridiculous,” and on top of that fans were taking off their masks as soon as security is out of sight, which, yup.
  • Las Vegas has extended its negotiating window again for a new soccer stadium to lure an MLS team, which makes you wonder why they even bothered to set a window in the first place instead of just hanging out a shingle saying, “Have Stadium $$$, Inquire Within.”
  • Sports team owners make tons of “dark money” to political campaigns to try to get elected officials to support their interests, according to ESPN, though disappointingly their only real source is an unnamed NBA owner. But that source did say, “There’s no question,” in italics and everything, so you know they’re serious.
  • Maybe the NHL should just play games outdoors so they can allow in fans? There are dumber ideas, but they might want to figure out how to get fans to keep their damn masks on first.
  • There are some new renderings of the New York Islanders‘ luxury suites at their new arena, and I can’t stop puzzling over what that weird counter-like thing is in this one, or why the women are all wearing stiletto heels to an NHL game. I’ll never understand hockey!

*UPDATE: Now it’s up.

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Friday roundup: Utah may build stadium for rugby (and the children!), Suns build big-ass kitchen, plus more robots than you can shake a stick at

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy October! We seem to have now reached the uncanny valley of the epidemic, where some things are returning to almost normal — or even hyper-normal, as in the case of the baseball postseason having expanded to include so many teams I keep expecting the Sugar Land Skeeters to show up — while other things remain sadly unchanged. I guess if there’s a silver lining it’s that the resumption of some normal things hasn’t caused the pandemic to worsen perceptibly (yet), but that’s what people were saying about the Netherlands back in June and that didn’t work out well at all. Just wear your masks, people, and don’t take them off to eat or talk on the phone or talk to the president, and let’s hope for the best.

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Friday roundup: Everything old is new again

access_time personNeil deMause

What a week! In addition to the new site design and new magnets and new sports subsidy demands rising and falling almost before you could even register them, this week featured the long-awaited debut of Defector, the independent sports (but not only sports) site launched by the former staff of Deadspin. Read it for free, subscribe if you want to post comments and, you know, help support journalism for our uncertain future. I am a charter subscriber, needless to say, and am currently trying to decide which color t-shirt to buy.

On the down side, the entire West Coast has been set aflame by the deadly mix of climate change and gender-reveal parties and looks like a post-apocalyptic movie. The year 2020 comes at you fast. Let’s get to some more news:

  • The owners of the New York Islanders are angling to downsize the Nassau Coliseum so that it doesn’t compete with their new Belmont Park arena for sports and the largest concerts, which is problematic in that they don’t actually hold the lease on the Coliseum, and already ironic in that the Coliseum was already just downsized once so as not to compete with the Islanders’ previous new arena in Brooklyn. Maybe this whole arena glut problem is something New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo might have considered before giving the Belmont project a whole bunch of land price breaks and a new train station? Meh, probably not necessary, we’re all friends here.
  • Hey look, we’re already calling the Los Angeles Angels stadium purchase a $320 million deal even though it’s really only $150 million plus a whole lot of “thanks for some building affordable housing and parks,” that was fast, Spectrum News 1.
  • Some rare actual good news from the pandemic: Somebody in Arlington was smart enough to include a clause in the Texas Rangers‘ lease on their new stadium that requires the team owners to triple their rent payments if parking and ticket tax revenue fell short of projections, which obviously they’re doing what with nobody buying tickets or parking this year. Sure, it’s still only another $4 million, which won’t go far toward paying off the city’s roughly half a billion dollars in stadium costs, but it’s better than a kick in the head. (Also, what on earth is going on in that photo of the Rangers’ stadium that D Magazine used as its illustration?)
  • The Inglewood city council approved the sale of 22 acres of public land to Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer for $66 million, which I don’t even know how to determine whether it’s a fair deal or not anymore, but given the city mayor’s idea of appropriate oversight, I’m not super-optimistic.
  • University of Texas-Austin will have about 18,000 fans in attendance for its season-opening college football game tomorrow, but rest assured that it will be keeping everyone safe by … requiring student season ticket holders to test negative for Covid before being allowed into the game, but not requiring the same of anyone else? (Also fun: They’re supposed to all go get tested today, and get their results back tomorrow, which is not how Covid testing works right now at all.) Clearly the desire to look where the light is better is strong.
  • The Las Vegas Sun has a loooooong article about the process by which the Raiders got their new stadium in Las Vegas that pretty much comes down to “Mark Davis was the sincerest pumpkin patch of all,” but by all means go ahead and read it if you like sentences like “The first major obstacle was how to get both projects done in what most in the resort corridor would feel was a reasonable [tax increase]. That took time to overcome.”
  • Marc Normandin took a great look back at that time the owner of the San Diego Padres tried to gift the team to the city of San Diego for free and MLB said no. It’s subscriber-only, so I’ll quote my favorite section: “There is a reason Mark Cuban will never own an MLB franchise, and that reason is that he’s the kind of owner who might shake things up in a way that forces other owners to have to spend money they don’t want to. On clubhouse comforts, on minor-league players Cuban might try to increase the pay and better the living conditions of in order to produce happier, healthier future MLB players: there is no guarantee Cuban would do those things, necessarily, but his actions and spending helped shape the way the current NBA locker rooms look, so the possibility exists, and that possibility is too big of a risk for MLB’s current 30 owners to take. So, instead, they aim for safe options, like a minority owner in Cleveland becoming the majority owner in Kansas City, as he’s already proven he understands the game and how to play it.”
  • First Dave Dombrowski and Dave Stewart, now Justin Timberlake — if building 1990s star power is the way to get an MLB franchise, Nashville is a shoo-in. Though as Normandin notes, they’d probably be better off finding a minority owner from Cleveland.

Okay, I have to go pick up my computer from its trip to the computer mechanic so I can go back to typing these updates on a keyboard I can actually see the letters on. (Yet another thing that happened this week.) Try to have a good weekend, and see you all on Monday.

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Friday roundup: Throwing good money after bad edition

access_time personNeil deMause

This will be remembered as the week that all 30 MLB teams played at once, after the Cincinnati Reds returned from being sidelined by a positive Covid test … for one whole day, until the New York Mets were sidelined by two positive Covid tests. Is this a sign that having 900 players plus coaches plus other staff flying around a country with some of the highest Covid rates in the world is likely to keep resulting in occasional infections? Probably! Is it a sign that the MLB season is doomed to fail? Probably not, given that the season is almost halfway over already, though it’s going to get interesting once the “Everybody Plays!” postseason kicks off and a positive test result means delaying the entire schedule, and/or maybe playing entire playoff series as seven-inning doubleheaders. There’s increasing talk of playing everything after the first round in a bubble in, uh, Texas and Southern California, which sounds like a terrible idea but the NBA has managed to keep its players uninfected in the eye of the Covid hurricane in Florida, so who knows, really. Maybe there are no good ideas right now, only more and less terrible ones.

Anyway, enough about the goofy baseball season that could end up with a sub-.500 team winning the World Series, let’s talk about what you’re really here for:

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